Andrew Lark

Search at the speed of type has implications for marketers

Search now faster than the speed of type… ok, like about time, really. Though I wonder what impact this will have on search marketing?

If the idea is to accelerate your experience off the search page, will this place an even greater premium on the top 2-3 search results. Give the results appear in real-time, will it reduce the time you linger on the page and consider other results?

What do you think?

Converting Followers to Activists

Ask a marketer how they are doing on the social media front and you are likely to get a long list of data points. Many of these centered on followers. You’ll hear comments like - “Oh we rock on Twitter, like XXX gazillion people are following us”. Or, “our Facebook community is amazing, XX have joined”.

The question is, how many of these people are real activists vs, ‘slactavists’. Now, I’m defining slactavists pretty liberally here. I’m speaking about the large number of people that with the convenience of a mouse click join or subscribe and rarely, if ever, engage. They might not even follow. Really.

I’ve seen this more extreme term -- slactivists – popping up more. They are the folks that join, subscribe, friend only to do little or nothing. Sure, you have permission to market to them. But can you convert them into active followers or better still, activists – people engaged in your brand.

The issue for marketers is balancing this small army out with activists. People who will activate demand, interest, and excitement. There are a couple of keys:

1. Relate to causes. At Dell we learnt this through our ReGeneration project. We gave our followers a chance to get express themselves on all things green. The key here is that the reason they join might not be the reason they move to being an activist.  You need to work hard to figure out what really motivates your communities – and then become a source of insight and information
2. Give them a platform and vehicle to get engaged. Ideastorm is our vehicle for doing this. As are our communities. But don’t understimate the ability of left-field ideas to drive engagement. We learnt this through our project with Grafiti on Facebook where thousands drew images of what green meant to them and tens of thousands voted. We achieved amazing engagement by allowing people to express themselves in a non written way – and at almost no cost to us.
3. Make everything social. Social isn’t a point strategy that can be confined to a discrete project. Everything, internal and external needs to be be made social. Transparency doesn’t just breed accountability, it also drives engagement.

Every marketing effort will need to look at drawing a line between slactavists and activists. Building the base of slactivists will be important – converting them to activists will be even more important.

On Ambition

Tom Peters has some interesting ideas and exercises aimed at harnessing ambition. Here's an example:

Performance
The output. The measurement of the progress towards the ambition, where talented people take pride in executing their personal accountability and continually add value through discipline, hard work and continuous learning.

Goals, targets and rewards focus talent on the performance parameters that will deliver.

To get going…

With a few like-minded people create a list of all the performance measurements you use. Analyse what type of behaviour the measurements reward. Ask yourselves if the rewarded behaviour really helps to achieve your ambition. If it does; do more of it. If it doesn’t; challenge your assumptions of having it as a measurement. Start a discussion on how you could measure the real value added of your business/department.

INFLUENCEABLES

Johnnie has a bit on the coverage of Duncan Watt's ideas on Influencers vs. Influenceables... If you haven't read it, you should... His view is that that ordinary people have just as much influence as influential people have in making something popular. Cory, Guy, Seth, Spike, and scores of others have all chimed in.

On The Media interviewed Clive Thompson who wrote the Fast Company article that compellingly explains Duncan Watts’ word-of-mouth randomness theory. In the radio interview (available online here), Clive summarizes Duncan’s complex theory this way,

“It’s not how influential each person is, it’s how influenceable everyone else is. If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start it.”

It really got me thinking.  I'm ready to hold Gladwell's ideas and Watt's in my head at the same time.  I don't think they are exclusive.

What I don't agree with is that society is "ready" to embrace trends - especially commercial trends.  That's what marketers do.  They prepare society for trends and then activate those trends... Kind of like Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm.

There are instances where society becomes ready to embrace a trend - like Green -- and smart marketers figure out how to leverage that.

Why 47% of Campaigns Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeeds

Jon Beattie of Marker is up at the Future of Online Advertising Conference - he's put together a great summary of a keynote on why 47% of campaigns fail - a summary of the presentation by Greg Stuart at the Future of Online Advertising conference today in New York. Greg is the former CEO, IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and co-author of “What Sticks“.

He claims: Over US$112 billion ad spend is wasted out of a total of $295bn - Advertisers and agencies use the excuse of “publicity” to justify a failed campaign.

Here are the three highlights I liked:

1. Did the campaign message get through? 31% of campaigns failed
2. Out of 5 advertisers (P&G, J&J, Kraft, Nestle, McDonald’s) that did creative research of online campaigns: 1 was okay; 2 found half didn’t work; 2 all ads failed and had to start again
3. McDonald’s took 20 per cent from TV put 13.4% into online kept the rest and increased awareness by 5 per cent when it had previously leveled out using traditional media.

That Timesheet Thing Again

Stumbled onto this piece (sub required) from Peter Arnell that hits nicely at what I keep ranting on timesheets and agency billing about. In this case, replace hours billed with request for a full time equivalent employee:

It is time to reconcile archaic FTE accounting with the talent-driven, multidimensional world we live in today. There is more creative doing, more crossing of traditional boundaries, more thinking and contributing by talent who multitask and participate on many levels at once. Great ideas are the cultural currency that clients will profit from in the end, and attaining this level of contribution does not run on a clock or time sheet.

Let's put a typical staffing allocation formula in terms of MasterCard:
An experienced account director: FTE of 1
A sane creative team: FTE of 3.2
A person with one good idea: Priceless

The goal of clients should be to seek what is priceless at a cost agencies and their talent deserve.

Source: Advertising Age - CMO Strategy - Peter Arnell: Find Value in Results You Cannot Measure

Measurement Landscape Shifts

One of the two leaders in communications measurement - CYMFONY - just got gobbled up. Consolidation was inevitible in this market - and as I've said before, it won't serve communicators as well as it will serve marketers.

Ultimately what we needed was an evolution of communications measurement that was an inch wide and a mile deep. Maybe we will get that... But back to the announcement:

Steven Fredericks, TNS MI president and CEO, said the company had been looking to acquire a company in the market influence analytics space for about a year and decided on Cymfony because "they were the most advanced in terms of the technology."

"We decided we had to go and get the leader [in the space]," he added. "We think this whole area is going to explode in the next couple of years. We think it's going to reach the tipping point very quickly and we wanted to target it."

Now, CYMFONY is a very fine company with some great talent and neat innovations - I'm not sure there is much credence to them being the most advanced in technology or being the leader in the space, but then his guess is as good as mine on both fronts. What I do agree absolutely with is that this validates the incredible investment of time and money made by the big measurement vendors.

Where CYMFONY had established an enviable lead is in measuring conversations across blogs and in the various recommendation zones of sites such as Amazon. When coupled with core media data, this is immensely powerful to everyone from product management through customer service. Brand tracking is just one dimension that this capability delivers. CYMFONY were on the right track in delving into product monitoring, reputation analytics, and marketing performance measurement.

The real rub here is that the kind of data and insight CYMFONY and Biz360 have been generating is of immense value to media planners and marketers as a whole. TNS are now armed with the most complete set of tools for the CMO and that will make for a pretty compelling proposition that others will have trouble competing with - especially the smaller vendors who are already under substantial pressure. As Katie says, the giants are lining-up.

We needed a powerhouse and we got one. Congrats to TNS and go for it - you have a very large market waiting for what you have just created. In many respects they could be answering a question that many of us have had about this space for some time - "is communications measurement a feature of a broader marketing performance and analytics tool-kit, or, a stand-alone industry serving the communicator...?"

BTW, hat-tip to CYMFONY's PR team - they did a great job of SEO optimizing the announcement and complementing the press release with blog posts and a podcast.

Prediction Markets at confab.yahoo

Good read over at Read/Write web and the Software Abstractions Blog. Quick summary.

1. Prediction Markets are a great mechanism to extract knowledge already present within the organization and to make better predictions
2. These markets highlight both the collective wisdom which no one person knows individually, and common knowledge which no one is willing to talk about openly
3. They work properly only when they have an adequate number of knowledgeable participants who work individually
4. Participants must have reasonable incentives (financial or social) to make their efforts worthwhile
5. If the group is large enough, the ratio of experts vs amateurs does not have much impact; often, the real experts are unexpected
6. The results of a Prediction Market are probabilities; they must be confirmed through other, external, means

Loved the idea of tracking team progress against a goal using collective wisdom and predictive markets theory. This should be a feature in all project management software.

A Manifestation of the Medium

Interesting idea Tim:

You may think I’m getting obsessed with Google News these days. I assure you I’m not but I did think it was quite revealing that when I searched on ‘Edelman Walmart blog’ I got twelve news responses. When I used the site to search for blogs with the same criteria I got 1,458 responses. That means for every news item there were over 120 blog mentions. Going back to my HP item the ratio was more like 1.5 blog mentions to each news item. I guess this shows how the blogging world works.

Neither of us have the time to validate this but I suspect that they vast majority of the blog posts are "echoes".

The echo in traditional media tends to be word of mouth and email chatter. The echo in the blogosphere tends to be text reposts - as in "Nice post on Tim's blog - I agree...".

So, while it would appear that there is more activity, that activity is a manifestation of the medium. The blogosphere in effect becomes a barometer of interest with one of your audiences - bloggers, and their constituents. What it isn't - necessarily - is a reflection of interest by your target audience.

See Katie on this as well...

Measuring Engagement

The degree to which readers engage with media should be a critical factor in understanding the value of that media. My view has been that the degree to which actions intended from any marketing activity - say downloads - occur is proportional to participation in that media by readers/ views/ the community. For this reason I like Scoble's idea on measuring media engagement.

This will require a step-change in thinking by communicators. Rather than looking at the reach of publications, we need to think in terms of participation.

Illuminating Buzz's experience in downloads driven by USA Today vs. Scoble is our experience with online tech media. From them, the traffic is nominal. But a post by James Governor of Redmonk referring to LogLogic on average drives a 14% spike in traffic to the site. This is just one dimension of participation and probably the most base level (traffic, link push-through, etc.).

Where Scoble starts going with this idea is really interesting and where you get to the heart of participation. Do people not only scoot from James to us but when they arrive do they start doing things - like downloading, viewing, registering, commenting? That is where traffic becomes exponentially available.

So which is more valuable to me. InfoWorld or Monkchips? The lazy answer is both. But in resource constrained start-ups you punt on the media driving hardcore participation.